The Nature of a Man
by Person4
Summary: It's been ten years since the last time Danny saw Vlad, and now a new enemy has thrown their lives back together. But a decade of total solitude has had an effect on Vlad's mind, and Danny will need to help him pull himself together if they're to survive.
1. A Mind Divides the Man

Ten years had passed since he'd help save the earth and became a hero known by the whole world, and surprisingly little had changed.

He still fought ghosts on an almost daily basis, although the ghosts which chose to confront him got tougher and tougher as his own strength grew. He still hung out with Tucker and Sam more than anyone else, even though he and Sam had broken up with each other after a few years when it became clear that they were starting to drift apart and didn't want to risk losing their friendship by clinging to a fading romance until they couldn't stand each other. He still wanted to be an astronaut, though with his schedule and dislike of schoolwork the degree required was proving to be a bitch for him to get; he was already two years over the four most people got their bachelor's degree in, but at least he only had a semester left.

And he still thought about Vlad Masters often, even though the man had been gone-from both his life and his world-for a decade.

It wasn't like he spent much time thinking about other ghosts he'd known back then. Most of them had started avoiding Amity Park as he got strong enough to make them realize that they had no chance against him, making way for new, stronger, ghosts who sought him out for the challenge. The only one he still saw often was Skulker, but the way things stood between them were completely different than they'd been back when Danny was fourteen. At some point he'd decided that the tougher ghosts coming to town were a sign that Danny was more useful as bait than he'd be as a head mounted on his wall. He'd declared that he'd 'captured' the ghost child and was keeping him in a 'nature reserve' that had been set up for him. A nature reserve that just happened to be Amity Park.

Danny thought the whole thing was stupid, but whatever. If Skulker had some weird hunter's pride issues that wouldn't let him declare a truce until he'd come up with some way of making it sound like he'd won, fine. All that really mattered was that it had been seven years since the last time he'd attacked Danny inside the city, and that he'd usually show up to help out with any really tough enemies. On the downside, any time he noticed that Danny had gone out of town for a little while chances were that he'd chase him down for 'escaping', but it was a small price to pay.

Mostly with his old enemies it was out of sight, out of mind. Some of them he'd started to get along with just fine if they happened to run into each other-Johnny 13 and Kitty had never been _that_ bad to begin with, and Ember had become a lot easier to stand once she realized that she could make it in the music business without hypnotizing anyone-and some he didn't think he'd ever be able to get along with peacefully, but all were equally forgettable when they weren't around.

With Vlad, it was different. He didn't know everything that had happened in space, in fact he hardly even knew more than the tiny bit of information everyone in the world had; his dad and Vlad had gone into space together, and then his dad had come back again alone. The main thing that he knew for sure that the rest of the world could only guess at was that Vlad had still been alive the last time Jack had seen him. But it wasn't like he could just ask for all the gritty details. Only a giant asshole would press their own dad for information about how and why he abandoned the person he'd considered his best friend trapped in the void of space.

The other thing he knew, the thing that he never shared with anyone else and that kept him from just banishing Vlad from his memories like all the others, was that his dad had been _wrong_.

There weren't many things that Danny could think of that would be more horrible than being trapped and alone, with almost no hope of escape and fully aware of it, forever. In all his years spent ghost hunting there had only ever been one ghost who he'd considered completely, irredeemably, evil to the point that he deserved that punishment, and Vlad wasn't that one. Even Pariah Dark at least got to be unconscious in his sarcophagus, at least as far as Danny knew.

Over time he'd spent more and more time thinking about alternate ways things could have gone that would have made it easier for him to just write Vlad off for good. If he'd been a full ghost instead of another halfa Danny could have assumed that time passing felt differently, a decade less huge, to him; what were ten years when you could live for centuries? If Danny had never gone into the future, if he'd never seen the basically decent guy Vlad could have become, he would have accepted that if Jack thought Vlad was bad enough to deserve being stuck in space than he really was. If anyone had ever found evidence of Vlad actually going as far as killing anyone, instead of just completely failing to ever even successfully harm Jack, he could have written him off as a murderer who deserved whatever he got.

Instead all signs pointed to him preferring violence-free, if incredibly amoral and generally involving overshadowing or ghostly thievery, methods for getting whatever he wanted in the human world. And that was what it all boiled down to. He deserved to have been in jail for a decade to pay for his crimes. He _didn't_ deserve to have spent all that time in solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.

Danny thought about going back into space and trying to find Vlad more and more often as time went by, and the thought of someone being alone for that long got increasingly awful. He'd known pretty much the first time the thought had crossed his mind that someday he was going to do it-if he was willing to even _consider_ rescuing Vlad after everything he'd done it was proof in and of itself that Danny wasn't going to be able to stand leaving someone out there forever-but as of yet he'd never been able to bring himself to actually do it.

In part it was because of his dad. Even if Danny didn't know the full story of what happened, there was one thing he knew for sure; that Jack Fenton would _never_ have abandoned Vlad Masters unless he'd said or done something pretty damned unforgivable out there in space. Worse even than taking over the world, seeing as when he'd left on the shuttle Jack had been planning on at least trying to preserve their friendship. And, okay, his dad was the type of guy who constantly overreacted. Especially in a fight. Especially when that fight was against a ghost. But Danny had to believe that just that once Jack had kept a completely clear head in the heat of the moment. It was too awful to think that his dad had doomed someone-someone who he'd cared about for longer than Danny had been alive-to float alone in space for god only knew how long just because of an overreaction. He had to have faith that there'd been a reason.

Then there was the problem that, well, he just didn't know where Vlad was. It was probably safe to assume that he'd been somewhere in the path the asteroid had followed to start out with, though even that he didn't know for sure, but who could say which way he might have gone from there when his power of flight made moving around in space much easier than it would be for other people? Every so often Danny would stand out with a telescope and scan the skies in the direction the asteroid had come from, but space was _huge_ and he hadn't spotted a sign of him yet. His telescope might not even be powerful enough to make out the tiny speck of a human body in space even if he pointed it right at Vlad, though his mom had been the one to make if for him which made it stronger than any other he could get his hands on without begging his way into an observatory.

Without a better place to start looking than somewhere he might have been ten years ago, how could Danny go searching for him? Everywhere between Earth and where the asteroid had been the last time he knew for sure Vlad was still on the Fenton Rocket was just too broad an area, and _that_ was assuming that Vlad wasn't stupid enough to take off for Proxima Centauri in the hopes of finding intelligent life in that area since he'd burned his bridges on Earth. Danny didn't _think_ he'd ever be that dumb, but who knew what kinds of things would start to seem like a good idea after years spent alone?

Danny was _never_ going to feel guilty enough about what had happened to Vlad to risk getting himself stuck in space too because he'd gotten so turned around in the millions and millions of miles that Vlad might be floating through that he'd ended up hopelessly lost and eventually out of fuel. He might be a hero, but he didn't plan on martyring himself for the sake of a giant asshole.

So he put off trying to search for him. He waited for some clue of where to begin.

And eventually it was taken out of his hands completely.


	2. The Hand of Judgement

You'd think that a guy who could both fly and pass straight through walls would never be late _anywhere_. Especially after he'd had more than ten years of practice to get his speed up and erase even the tiniest second of hesitation before he zoomed straight through a seemingly solid building.

As Danny proved multiple times per month, you'd be wrong.

It wasn't like he _meant_ to be late as often as he was. He'd gotten good at waking up with his alarm clock even without his parents around to burst in on him if he hadn't shown any signs of responding after the first few beeps, he never (well, _almost_ never, and when he did that's what duplicating himself was for) made plans to do more than one thing at the same time, and he _tried_ to keep an eye on the clock.

Unfortunately, 'trying' and 'succeeding' were two very different things, and before he knew it he'd get caught up in hanging out with his friends, or playing a fun new game, or even in doing _homework_ which was kind of pathetic but living the life of a superhero meant that he needed to grab time to study wherever he could find it, and the next thing he knew he'd look up and realize that he had less than five minutes to get to class.

_One day_ he was going to get around to copying his schedule into his cellphone and having it give him alerts when he still had plenty of time, but that day had not yet come.

It was a lucky thing that his shortcut of the day involved cutting across the park, he thought when an ecto-blast suddenly cut him off on his latest rush to class. Nice wide-open spaces, no chance that whoever was attacking him would blast a hole in a building in pursuit of him, very little chance of anyone calling him up to yell at him (or, more likely, talk at him with frosty politeness) about property damage to the city.

Having his secret identity revealed to the world might have made his life easier in _most_ ways, but boy did it get annoying that people knew just who to call up when a fight got too destructive. It didn't even matter that he was the one doing his best to _minimize_ the damage, his enemies didn't get phone service in the ghost zone so he was the one that had to deal with all the complaints.

"Okay, any chance we can reschedule this?" he asked, stopping in mid-air and turning around to try and spot who it was that had attacked. "Because, seriously, I think Professor Robbins is gonna chew my head off if I show up in the middle of his lecture one more time."

"You need have no fear of that," a female voice said in a tone that was completely flat and inflectionless. "You shall never be tardy again."

"Oh, you have _got_ to put more work into your threats," he said, smirking in the general direction the voice had come from though he still couldn't see its source. "Seriously, I've been doing this for so long that it takes a lot more than that to make me start worrying. That's less a threat and more something I _wish_ for. Tell you what, I'll point you towards this guy I know, Skulker, you can try and get him to give you a few lines to bellow at me, and you can come find me again at, like, five? Six? Six would be good." Another blast shot at him from a different angle than the one he was looking in, and he sighed and muttered to himself, "Guess not."

He didn't really like sending a duplicate off to do something else when he was in the middle of a fight, especially not something else that took as much of his concentration as school. It was too likely that he'd end up wincing at nothing like an idiot when the him who was off fighting took an especially nasty hit, or, even worse, shouting out loud. He'd just never gotten to be as good as Vlad had seemed to be at keeping his separate minds, well, _separate_. Maybe it was just because Vlad had been so good at duplicity, while Danny had kind of sucked at it back when it was necessary to hide his ghost form and then happily given up on even trying as soon as he could.

But he didn't have much of a choice if he didn't want, well, the whole head-biting-off thing to happen. Some of his teachers were very understanding about how the ghost side of his life could get in the way of the human half just as long as they heard about a fight that took place during the class period. Robbins was as far from being one of them as it was possible to get. Worse, he was one of the few professors Danny'd had since starting college who was _really_ serious about attendance. The guy actually took attendance every day.

"Fine, let's get this over with," he said, splitting himself in two and sending the other on its way to school.

That was the plan, at least, but before his duplicate had flown more than a few yards a net of energy suddenly appeared before him, tangling around him before he even had a chance to think of dodging.

"No part of you shall escape this place, Abomination," another voice said, this one male and just as monotonous as the first.

"Okay, the threats are getting a little better," he allowed, starting to actually take this a little more seriously. His duplicate struggled to free himself from the net while he warily turned in a circle, looking hard for any trace of the enemy. "Well, two-on-two. We'll make this a fair fight."

"Two? No," yet another hollow voice said, and they finally began to show themselves, ten of them, fifteen, more, floating all around him in a rough sphere. The main impression that he got from them was _gray_; gray skin, gray robes, gray hooded cloaks pulled low enough to hide their entire faces save their gray mouths and chins. If he looked he could see the differences between them-heights, weights, gender, lips that were full or thin, strong chins and weak-but if he wasn't deliberately searching those differences out they all just blended together into a faceless crowd.

"This is not a fight, Abomination," one of them said just behind him, her voice as high and clear as a little girl's but entirely empty. When he whirled around to face her she seemed even younger than he'd guessed from the voice, a tiny form almost lost in her cloak. "This is a mission."

The ghost beside her took up right where her words left off. "We've planned long, and patiently, and now the time has finally come."

The tiniest twitch of that ghost's head as he finished speaking, as if he had gone from looking at Danny to gazing past him even though the hood should have kept him from seeing anything, was all the warning that Danny had before he suddenly felt a presence directly behind him and felt something being clamped around his waist. But he didn't realize just how much trouble he was in until a sudden burst of pain flared all through his body and he suddenly began to plummet like a stone as his ghost form became impossible to sustain.

He would have guessed that they'd just let him smash into the ground, but instead he was quickly caught and lowered to the ground with surprising gentleness. Once his head was clear of the initial panic of the fall he finally really noticed that is was a Fenton Specter Deflector wrapped around his waist and stared at it in shock. "This is _my parents'!_ How did you- If you've done anything to hurt them I swear you'll _wish_ you'd let me fall!"

"We've planned long, and patiently," the ghost who had caught him repeated, and he recognized her voice as that of the first ghost who'd spoken to him.

The little girl chipped in again and for the first time he heard a trace of inflection in one of their voices, the barest hint of the sing-song tone children used when telling a story, "Once upon a time there was a foolish young abomination who let a weapon he should never have forgotten about be lost in the woods where anyone could find it, if they had the will to search."

"The woods?" Danny searched his mind for what they could be talking about, and was suddenly smacked by a memory that he hadn't thought about in years. Mostly to protect himself from remembering the bit where his mom played the seductress. "Wait, this is the one I stuck on _Vlad_? That's not possible, there's no way he'd have just left it in the woods!" But even as he spoke he became less sure of that. Yeah, Vlad was usually more careful than that, but if he was pissed off and in pain and just wanted to slink home to patch up his wounds and sulk over losing Maddie, Danny, and his ghostly attack animals in one fell swoop? Yeah, maybe he would have just torn it off and thrown it as far from him as he could the minute he had a chance.

But they didn't seem at all interested in letting him know if he'd gotten it right or not. Instead of answering him the first ghost woman, apparently their leader or spokesperson or something, kneeled down before him so they would have been at eye-level if he could actually see her eyes. "Fear not, Abomination, we mean you no harm. Entirely the opposite; we shall cleanse the sins of your existence from your soul and you shall be an abomination no longer."

Danny had just enough time to see her lips curving into the faintest smile, and then the ghost surrounded him attacked from all sides and everything fell into darkness.

He hardly even stirred when one lifted him and carried him away, while around the edges of the park citizens of Amity Park stared in horror at the sight of the hero being so thoroughly defeated. 


	3. Wait In Death's Halls

Danny woke up slowly, sharp pain shooting through his head like someone had driven nails through his temples. His first thought, as he became aware enough to realize that he was on a cold hard floor instead of his nice soft bed, was to wonder just how hard he'd partied the night before, just who'd _convinced_ him to do it since on his own he rarely got more than buzzed, and to hope that his hard 'bed' was just the linoleum in his bathroom and he hadn't ended up crashing on the pavement somewhere.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem likely. There was a big difference between the feelings of fake tile and rock.

Then he remembered exactly what had happened and sat up with a start, almost falling straight back down again at the fresh wave of pain through his head. But when it passed and he was able to focus on his surroundings he almost laughed out loud at what he saw.

These ghosts had to be _dumb_. Okay, they'd managed to take him down harder and faster than anybody else had in years, but that must just have been luck and the element of surprise. Nothing but a fluke. Because if they were actually smart enough to be worth worrying about, they wouldn't have just stuck him in a stone cell without anybody in there to guard him like they thought he might just _forget_ he could float through walls. They hadn't even left the Specter Deflector on him.

Not that it would have made much of a difference. The pain of it might have startled him enough to make him drop his ghost form before, but that was just because he hadn't expected it. Back when Vlad had worn the thing he'd been able to hold onto enough of his control over his powers to practically duplicate himself. If _he'd_ been that strong, Danny was sure that after ten years of practice with his powers he'd be able to keep himself intangible at least long enough to get through a wall, Deflector or no.

He waited until the pain in his head had gone down before making his move so he'd be able to concentrate if he ended up in a fight, but the instant he thought he was ready he went ghost and floated through the wall.

Only to slam straight into a second barrier on the other side. He yelped as he bounced back off it, his headache roaring back to its full force at the rattling his brain got from the hit. When he landed on the ground he discovered that the other barrier extended below the cell as well, his body unsettling ending up looking like the regular stone floor had swallowed up a good chunk of his body before it hit that second ground.

"Did you think us fools, Abomination?" the female voice he was quickly growing to hate said, and when Danny whipped around he realized that it was coming from a small barred window set in the door to the room.

"You've gotta admit, it looked pretty likely for a minute there," he said, gingerly poking his hand through the wall again to feel the barrier beyond it. "What, you stole one of my parents ghost shields too?"

"We would do no such thing; we are neither thieves nor ones who would rely so much upon the technology of the living. The one piece which was unfortunately necessary for your capture was willingly cast aside, first by you and then by the other." He saw her hand reach into the window, and after a second realized that she was lightly stroking a bar in a second set directly behind the first. "We built this cell stone by stone as we waited for the day our plans could come to fruition, first with the rock we smuggled away from your realm over the years, then the shell created around us with rock from ours. We learned from your first encounter with Sheriff Walker. Whichever form you take you shall not escape us, and even if you did it is unlikely that you would ever find your way home from this corner of the Zone."

"You know about that thing with Walker? Just how long have you creeps been watching me?" Danny asked, vaguely freaked out at the idea that he might have been stalked for that long without ever even realizing it.

"Since you first met the other abomination. Him we watched since he first began his meddling in the Ghost Zone, luring good pure ghosts into his employ. We were not making a joke when we told you that we have planned long."

"Man, you guys are such laugh riots how could I be sure?" Danny asked, rolling his eyes. "Why don't we cut the small talk? What are you creeps planning to do to me?"

_Try_ to do to me, he mentally amended. They might have built their trap well, but he'd find a way out of it. He always had before.

"Do? Why, nothing. Nothing save keep you, safe and well, until the day are purged of the sin which taints you. You shall be fed, you shall be kept in as much comfort as your cell allows, if you wish for a book or puzzle or some other amusement simply ask and we shall do our best to provide it as long as it can fit through your food slot or between the bars in your window. We are not cruel people, Abomination, we simply cannot stand by and allow you to flaunt the perversion of your existence to the world any longer."

Danny raised his eyes at the mention of 'comfort', glancing around the bare stone cell. There wasn't even a cot for him to sleep on, though now that he looked he could see that there was at least a folded up blanket and a pillow tucked away in one corner. "Enough of this 'Abomination' garbage. My name's Danny. Dan. Ny. It's three whole syllables shorter, I'm sure you can manage it." He floated himself a couple of inches above the ground and turned himself back to human, landing neatly on his feet when he dropped back to the inner floor of the room. "Okay, so let's say, _hypothetically_, I was willing to do whatever you need to get rid of this 'sin' you're so worried about quickly. What would that take? Like, an Act of Contrition and five Hail Marys?" He wasn't actually completely sure what that would mean, but it was the type of thing he heard on TV when characters went to confession and maybe he could figure out a way to fake his way through it.

"It will take your death, Abomination. Do you not even _recognize_ your sin? Even now you revel in it, every breath you take a mockery to the pure clarity of true death." She was actually managing to _emote_ now, a quiet hint of anger in her voice that would have seemed like nothing more than being faintly annoyed in anyone else coming across like unbridled rage compared to her usual monotone. "Life and death were _never_ meant to meet as they do within your form. 'Sin' is not a strong enough word for the profanity that is your half-death, but until new language is invented it shall have to suffice."

Danny felt a chill run through him as he listened to her speak. It wasn't like he'd never run into enemies who wanted him dead before. _Lots_ of ghosts had wanted him dead. But they'd had reasons for it that he could understand, even if he obviously didn't agree with them, reasons that generally revolved around them wanting to wreck havoc in the human world and him standing in the way. Even the ones who just wanted to prove their own strength by taking him down he could wrap his mind around though he thought that they were nuts. But this was just beyond him, how without any real malice towards him in particular or any apparent plans to run amuck on Earth once he was gone they could so fervently want him to just _not be._ The closest he'd come to experiencing something like it in the past was when his powers had still been new and his parents had still been hunting him for being a ghost, but at least they had genuinely believed that he was a threat to the living. "Whatever happened to 'we mean you no harm'?" he spat, narrowing his eyes at her. "Killing me is pretty major harm!"

"We are not murderers. We will do nothing to hasten your death, although if you wish to end this quickly we would gladly provide you with whatever tools you'd like to do so. We are simply holding you where your presence can do no more harm until the day of your passing." She reached through the bars of the cell, and he jerked backwards just before she could touch his cheek. "Pitiable Abomination, we would have brought you while you were still young enough to ease the transition into true ghosthood had it been possible, but we could not make a move until we'd located the other once more. It will be much simpler to see to you both at once."

Danny's stomach flopped over then dropped straight out of him, somehow simultaneously he felt a deep sense of dread and like a guilt-heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. "Other?" he repeated, needing to know for sure that his suspicion was right.

"Why, the one who first lead our eyes to you, of course." 


	4. The Worst Place We Could Be

They left him to stew over the information they'd given him, maybe not deliberately _trying_ to force him to focus on it but being stuck in an empty room didn't give him many other things to do to pass the time. The ones left to guard him didn't even try gloating, they just floated on either side of the door where he couldn't even see them unless he pressed his head right up against the window in the door and looked as far off to the side as it would allow him to see.

The only time they interacted with him was when he needed to use the bathroom and realized that there wasn't a toilet. He hoped they would take him to a restroom when he asked about it, potentially giving him a chance to escape. One he could take _before_ Vlad got there; it didn't matter how he'd felt about the guy being stuck in space, if Danny himself could find a way out quickly than he'd surely be able to as well. And Danny was sure that leaving him to do it alone would make them both happier than they be if they were stuck sharing a cell together, even if it wasn't for long.

Unfortunately, instead of unlocking the door to the cell they pointed his attention to a hole in the floor hidden in the shadows at the back corner of the room instead.

"What, _seriously_?" he asked, staring at it in disbelief.

"We assumed that would be less objectionable to you than a bucket," one of the guards said. "You will find that toilet paper has been provided in the bundle of bedding and other supplies that we've left with you."

The other added, "And do not even consider attempting to escape through it. The cesspit was built in the same manner as your cell."

"You guys are that thorough and you never thought for a second about, I dunno, slapping a _toilet_ on top of the hole? _Really_?"

"Your comfort is hardly our primary concern, Abomination," the second replied, sounding bored in the face of his disbelief.

But he thought that the other sounded that tiniest bit apologetic, noticeable only in comparison to how emotionless members of the group usually were, when he added, "If you'd like to learn if something might be arranged later, you must ask our leader when she returns with the other."

After that they went back to refusing to have anything to do with him, apparently deciding that he'd gotten all the information he needed out of them.

On the up side it gave him something other than brooding to focus on for awhile. He tried to be proud and refuse to let them force him to use a hole in the ground as a toilet, but that didn't last long. If he hadn't been late for class before being captured maybe he'd have been able to hold it until the leader got back and he had a chance to see if she could provide something better quickly, but because he'd been running late he hadn't bothered using the toilet before leaving his apartment. When you had to go you had to go, and everything he'd seen out of the nutcases holding him told him that there was no chance that they'd take pity on him and lead him to a real bathroom if he just set there squirming as he tried to hold it for long enough. If anything he bet they'd be hoping he'd hold on until his bladder burst and hastened his trip to 'true death'.

At least they'd made the thing wide enough that it wasn't hard to avoid making a mess.

Once that was over with he tried to make himself look on the bright side instead of stewing about his imprisonment. The only one he could find was that it didn't look like they knew about Dani, but that was a pretty damned big one. He didn't know if they'd already decided that he and Vlad were irredeemably abominable and stopped observing them to focus on building their trap by they time she showed up, or if they'd seen her come apart and gone off to celebrate there being one less half-ghost in the world so they'd missed her getting pulled back together, and he didn't care. All that mattered was that it from all they'd said it sounded like Vlad was the only other one they knew about.

He just hoped that she wouldn't try taking up the heroing slack as Dani Phantom once she found out that he wasn't around to protect the city. She'd only just started getting a pretty normal life over the past couple of years, since she'd come back from wandering the world and after he introduced her to his parents and explained the situation his mom had absolutely insisted that no cloned-child of hers was going to go through life without an education. So plain-old Dani Fenton, normal human girl as far as anyone could see, was safely under their radar, living with her Auntie Maddie and Uncle Jack while she studied for her GED. If she kept it up they'd never even notice her.

He hoped so anyway. It didn't seem like the ghosts holding him cared enough about the living to keep an eye on his family if he wasn't there stinking the place up with the half-ghost cooties they hated so much. If they hadn't seen her and put two-and-two together before than he didn't think that they'd suddenly start hanging around his old house long enough to see the resemblance to the supposedly-dead clone Vlad had made years ago now that they had him.

But if he was wrong, or if she did go out and start kicking butt during his absence, he'd handle it. He'd get _her_ out too, and he'd make the death-obsessed freaks pay even worse than he already planned to for picking on a girl whose life had already been screwed up enough before his parents finally gave her a home.

At the same time there was a guilty part of him that would actually kind of like it if she was dragged into this to, if he wasn't able to get out of there before they brought in Vlad. He didn't like the thought of being locked up in a small cell alone with his old worst enemy. Having someone else there who he knew was always on his side-especially where Vlad was concerned-would make him a lot more comfortable. Sam or Tucker would be even better, but he knew that wasn't going to happen.

He knew he shouldn't feel that way. He shouldn't ever want someone else to be in danger just to make himself feel more comfortable; he was supposed to be a hero after all. So he pushed the feeling aside and focused on trying to think of a way to just get out of there ASAP.

Then he heard the leader's voice through the door saying, "Step against the back wall, Abomination, and do not consider moving. We will not allow you a chance to reach the entrance if you do," and it was too late. 


	5. One Foot in the Grave

Danny had planned on ignoring her command, of course. He was only waited for them to open both doors so he could dart forward through them; he would have done it even faster, shifting to ghost-form and zooming through the earthly door that kept his human body trapped the minute the ghost door was open, if he wasn't afraid that they'd be ready to snap the Specter Deflector back on him while he was still half-way through. For all that the lady'd _claimed_ they didn't plan to hurt him, he wouldn't put it past any of them to use the excuse of an escape attempt to make his trip to 'true death' a quick, messy, and painful one.

Unfortunately, like it seemed to happen again and again with the nuts, they were smarter than he gave them credit for. The outer door opened, but instead of the inner one following suit a moment later a body phased through it and dropped to the floor like it had been shoved forward and couldn't catch itself before it fell. But Danny for that moment didn't pay it much mind, flying forward as fast as he could to try getting through that door. The prospect of getting snipped straight in half stopped mattering so much when it might be the only chance for escape he got in who knew how long.

But fast though he was, it didn't matter. Slamming a door shut would be quicker than crossing a room any time, and he slammed into the barrier with a bruising force that sent bursts of pain all through him. The only upside was that at least he'd been smart enough to take the impact on his shoulder just in case that happened, and hadn't cracked his skull open in his haste to try getting out.

"You. _Suck_," he spat out through clenched teeth as soon as the pain had dulled enough for him to think of talking, glaring at the leader of the ghosts through the barred windows in the cell doors. As far as one-liners went it was far from his wittiest, he'd come up with better ones even back when he was a dumb fourteen-year-old kid, but he thought the force of his conviction behind it more than made up for that. She sucked worse than a black hole, they all did, he didn't think he'd ever said anything more true.

"Such disrespect. You should be grateful to us, Abomination," she told him, not acting the slightest bit fazed by his display. Not that that was unexpected, if he magically transformed into a dancing pink rhino in a bikini right in front of her it probably still wouldn't even be enough to make her blink. "We have provided you with company which you may find preferable to us, for all that we have never done anything save try to help you."

"Riiiiight. Help," Danny said, rolling his eyes at her. "Only by the crazy cult definition of the word, Lady."

"Do you truly think that we are the mad ones, Abomination? From the day that you began your unseemly mockery of death you have lived a half-life. Even with your identity known to the world that remains true; your human life comes to a standstill the moment an enemy appears that you feel you must fight, yet you cling to your mortality too tightly to ever fully embrace your unlife." She curled her fingers through the bars of the window, leaning forward so she could peek down at the body on the floor through it. "The Other suffers as well for how tightly he has clung to his human life. Had he only been willing to relinquish it then ten years spent in solitude would have seemed nothing compared to the great stretch of infinity. Instead he clung to our form without one of our eternal minds to support it, using the sanctity of death to guard his mortal existence, and look what has become of him for his sin."

Danny hadn't really looked at Vlad since the moment he'd fallen into the cell, in part because trying to get out had been more important and he'd gotten caught up in the conversation after that, and in part-truthfully, for the most part-because he didn't _want_ to look. He could tell that he was being unusually quiet, not making as single sound while Danny and the woman talked, and from the corner of his eye he could see that he was staying much too still, and that was enough to make him afraid of what he would see. After years of wondering if his dad had gone too far that day in space, if Vlad, for all that he was an evil bastard, really deserved a punishment _that_ severe, part of him dreaded finally seeing the full extent of what Jack had done.

But it wasn't like he could just avoid looking at Vlad for however long it took him to finally escape. He just needed to get it over with, and to keep faith in his father no matter what he saw.

His first reaction was surprise at just how little Vlad had changed. Danny could only see half his face, but comparing it to the Vlad in his memories it didn't look like he'd aged a day in the ten years he'd been gone. But he guessed that made sense, none of the ghosts that he'd known since he was fourteen had ever aged-changed their styles in some cases, Technus for one updating himself every year or two, but not _aged_-so if Vlad had stayed in ghost-form all that time to stay alive why would he have gotten older?

But aside from that, he looked like hell. No, worse, he looked like a _corpse_, a ghost somehow made deader, lying too still for life and staring blankly and unblinkingly at the wall that he'd happened to land facing with his one visible eye. And the creepiest thing of all was just _why_ only one half of his face was visible; his ghostly body was half-sunken through the floor until it reached the ghost cell below, just like Danny's had briefly been the first time he'd tried getting out, but instead of moving he just stayed there looking for all the world like his body had been embedded in the stone.

Danny whirled back to the door, staring at the ghostly woman with wide eyes. "What the hell did you _do_ to him?" he asked, though the sinking feeling in his stomach told him that he already knew.

"We already told you, Abomination. He did this to himself; at any time he could have freed himself of suffering had he only the courage to give his mortal body to the void." She stepped away from the door, turning to glide away, but left him with one last line to think on, "We hope that you will find it in you to be brave much sooner, seeing what has become of him."

"Hey, wait, I wanted to talk to you about a toilet!" he called after her as she drifted off, but he'd remembered too late; by the time he'd finished talking she was already out of the small stretch of the hall outside he could make out through the window, and apparently she didn't feel inclined to come back.

Danny spent the next fifteen minutes prowling around the edges of the cell, keeping Vlad constantly visible in the corner of his eye. He didn't know what to _do_. If Vlad had been enraged when he showed up, full of ten years of built-up anger ready to explode at Danny as the best substitute for Jack the minute he saw him, Danny could have handled it. If he'd been depressed at the time he'd lost, or if he'd been overjoyed at getting back to the world-well, the Ghost Zone-if would have been weird, but Danny still thought he could deal. But what did you do with somebody who just seemed empty?

Finally he couldn't stand it anymore and hunched down beside him. "Hey. Hey, Vlad," he said, nudging him. It only had the effect of making him roll onto his back, though at least he was a little easier to look at when his whole face was visible. "C'mon, Fruitcake, it's me, Danny. Don't you want to blast me or something? Or... or taunt me for being stupid enough to think I'd seen the last of you? You know you like your villainous speeches."

For a long still moment there was nothing, then Vlad's eyes slowly drifted over to look at Danny. Danny found himself holding his breath from anticipation when Vlad's mouth started to open, just waiting to see if this was about to turn into a fight, or one of those uncomfortable times when they worked together, or what.

But he wasn't at all prepared for what he got. "Don't be ridiculous," Vlad said, his cultured voice gone hoarse with disuse. "Daniel Fenton is a fourteen-year-old boy."

Then he closed his eyes and would respond no longer. 


	6. The Past is Past

For the first day after that Danny didn't really have much contact with Vlad. Every once in a while he'd try convincing him to turn back into his human-form, until he realized that after ten years of Vlad's ghost-body being the only thing keeping him alive staying in it would probably be a hard habit to break and switched to just trying to get him to go tangible, and get out of the floor, but he didn't seem to hear.

He didn't seem to hear _anything_ after that one short worrying response he'd given the first time Danny tried talking to him. He seemed so disconnected from the world that he might as well still be out in space. There was something wrong in his head, Danny was sure of it, but he didn't know what it was or if there was anything he could do to fix it. He wished that Jazz were there-then quickly corrected himself that he wished that _they_ were wherever _she_ was-psychology was her thing, not his.

If she'd even be willing to try helping Vlad. Danny knew he couldn't count on that; he wasn't entirely sure why _he_ wanted to help him, except that being stuck in a small cell with nothing to do would be easier if he was with someone he could have a conversation with, even if that someone was Vlad.

Then he quickly _stopped_ thinking that, because with it came a disturbed voice in the back of his head wondering what it must have been like for Vlad if he was starting to crave someone to talk to after only a couple of days locked up.

The second day he gave up on getting Vlad to do anything and turned to the guards for something to get him above the level of the floor instead. One of them took the message for Danny when he changed shift, and a few hours later a folded up pool-float was shoved through the food slot in the door. He wondered where they'd found something so _normal_-looking in the Ghost Zone; even though he had met plenty of ghosts who were actually pretty normal people if you ignored the fact that they floated and glowed he still had trouble imagining them lounging around in a ghostly pool. It got even harder when he tried switching them out for his creepy captors in his imagination.

But he didn't waste much time thinking about it; they hadn't given him an air pump to go with the air raft, and he had a lot of blowing to do. He switched back to ghost form to do it-"Hey, Fruitcake," he said, nudging Vlad with his foot when he settled down with the float though he didn't really expect him to pay attention, "notice how I can be a ghost _and_ sit _on_ the floor instead of through it? How about playing Follow the Leader?"-and got going.

He thought that the best thing about being a ghost, at least for as long as he was working on the float, was that since his body didn't need to breathe he didn't start feeling winded over huffing and puffing away trying to fill it up. He was already putting more effort into something for _Vlad's_ sake than he'd like, he didn't want to end up lightheaded and dizzy to.

For the small about of credit he was willing to give the cultists, and even giving that much goaded at him, they'd found a float thick enough that it would get Vlad totally above the floor aside from a few places where a centimeter or two of his back dipped below it where most normal-sized ones would be too thin. It was tempting, _very_ tempting, to keep it for himself when he was done-why should _he_ be the one sleeping on the cold floor while Vlad got what was more-or-less an air mattress?-but he didn't give into it. He preferred sleeping as a human anyway, and he'd feel more comfortable if he no longer needed to worry about being freaked out by the sight of a person stuck in the floor when he woke up and was still too muzzy-headed to remember what was going on.

Lifting Vlad onto the mattress was easy work, Danny had spent years getting his body into the peak physical condition required by astronauts, and picking up one man the few seconds required to move him a couple of inches wasn't even enough to make him break a sweat. But it did make him remember that it wouldn't be able to _keep_ himself in that type of shape if he was stuck there long; one more reason to find a way to escape ASAP.

It wasn't until the third day that he finally decided to take a different tack with Vlad, if only to entertain himself.

He inched slowly closer until he was sitting by the head of the float. Vlad's eyes were open again, the only sign that he was awake. Danny sighed, then started talking.

"...You'll be happy to hear the Packers had a great decade," he began hesitantly, not even sure where to start talking to Vlad like a normal person instead of an enemy. "They won the Super Bowl once, and made it really close a few more time. You can probably get a highlights reel on blu-ray when we get back to Earth- Wait, do you even know what blu-ray is, or did it first come out after you were gone? Well, it's pretty much like a DVD, you could probably have figured that out yourself.

"You'll never _guess_ what Jazz ended up doing. Seriously, try. There's no chance you'll get it right." Danny waited for a second, just in case Vlad took him up on the opportunity to guess, but wasn't really surprised when there was nothing. Or maybe not nothing; were his eyes starting to look a little less glazed? "She's a psychologist for _ghosts_. Really. It's like this whole brand-new market she has all to herself; now that people have finally pulled their heads out of their butts about ghosts being real she helps the ones who want to live peacefully with humans... geeze, how does she put this? She helps them, uh, 'work past the compulsions that hold them apart from humanity.' Like, getting the Lunchlady Ghost to stop freaking out whenever she sees someone eating vegan. And then she met Box Ghost in Jazz's waiting room, so I guess Boxed Lunch being born is some gross kind of fate. But... you have no idea who I'm talking about because you were in Wisconsin during that one, weren't you?

"And it gets even weirder. You know who she ended up getting married to? _Tucker._ There's something really wrong about your big sister hooking up with your best friend, but it's been a few years now so I've gotten used to it. They've got the cutest daughter in the world; I'm her favorite uncle, which might not seem like a big deal when I'm her _only_ uncle, but I'm taking it.

"Dani's good. I don't know if you even care after what a giant bastard you were to her, but you know what the sad thing it? Even after all that, and all this time, I think part of her would like it if you did. She hasn't changed much since the last time you saw her, a little more street smart after all the time she spent fending for herself, but that's it. She's trying to get a normal life for herself now, and mom and dad have been helping her with it. Even if 'normal' isn't really the first word you think of when it comes to them.

"As for them, they're..." Danny paused, thinking it over. His parents were the hardest ones to talk to Vlad about; part of him thought maybe he should just avoid the subject all together, except he knew he gap would be noticeable and obvious. Finally he just tried staying as casual about them as he had with all the other information. "They're still happily married, I'm sure you're sorry to hear. They still spend their days chasing ghosts, though they've finally learned to be a little more choosey about their targets instead of blasting at everyone who can float through walls even if they aren't doing anything wrong; it helps that Jazz would ban them from seeing their granddaughter for a month if she found out they'd shot at one of her clients.

"Maybe you'll be glad to know that whatever you did up in space finally broke dad of thinking you're his best friend. He hasn't talked about you at all since then. I'm not going to try getting on your case about whatever you did or anything; it was years ago, and," Danny glanced over Vlad's still form. The only change to it was that he was _definitely_ looking at him now, "_God_, you've definitely paid for it."

He was trying to decided where to go from there when a noise almost made him jump out of his skin. He looked down and saw Vlad's mouth moving and realized that the rough sound was him talking for the second time in three days. "Maddie?"

"She's good. She's great. Now that paranormal science is actually being recognized as a reputable field she's finally getting the recognition she deserves; we've got a whole scrapbook full of articles about her and magazine covers she's been on. It's a good thing dad's always known that she was the brains of the family, or there might have been trouble over how much more attention she gets." He suddenly remembered just who he was saying that to and glared at Vlad, "Which means that there _wasn't_, it isn't something you can try making trouble between them about, and if you're thinking about starting that sort of thing up again once we're out of here I swear to God I'll leave you behind when I finally escape." Then he winced and shook his head, "No, sorry, I won't do that. I promise I'll get you back to Earth from here, Vlad, even if I have no clue what to do with you when we get there."

There wasn't anything else he could do. He couldn't just leave him alone again after seeing the state solitude had left him in. It wouldn't just be unheroic, it would be an outright evil thing to do.

He'd assumed that would be the only thing he'd get out of Vlad, the only thing that would matter enough to him to make the effort to say even one word, but again Vlad surprised him. "And you? If I'm really to believe you're Daniel, all grown up..."

"Me? Not as much has changed as you'd think. School, ghost fighting, all that stuff's still the same. You really want to hear all the boring things you need to do if you want to join NASA someday?" He leaned back against the wall, getting himself comfortable. "Well, it's not like I've got anything better to do. Let's see, where to start..." 


End file.
